


a dull knife

by cosmicevil



Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Smoking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:20:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24301252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicevil/pseuds/cosmicevil
Summary: Elliott’s a master at sticking his nose into places it doesn’t belong, okay, that’s like half the charm.
Relationships: Caustic | Alexander Nox/Mirage | Elliott Witt
Comments: 5
Kudos: 52





	a dull knife

**Author's Note:**

> the non-con tag is NOT referencing a scene between the two main characters.

Elliott has only had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on who you ask) of being squadded with Caustic three times prior to this game. 

During the first match Elliott had done his usual distracting, flashy, Mirage act, Caustic rarely spoke except for to let him and the rookie outlander they’d been teamed up with know where he was going, and they managed to climb up to fourth place before being picked off by Wraith’s squad. Not a bad game, overall.

The second went much the same way, except they didn’t even last until 10th place thanks to yet another inexperienced player on their team with them and Pathfinder with a sniper rifle (a winning combination for him, but a losing one for anyone he set his sights on.) Caustic hadn’t seemed particularly irritated with the loss, had even offered Elliott a ‘nice work’ once they were all back on the dropship. Elliott had truly expected so much worse from him, and felt bad for it. Caustic isn’t as poor a sport as everyone seems to think, great.

The third, though, geez. The third was a bloody, violent romp around World’s Edge, and it just so happens it’s the only one they’ve actually won together so far. Caustic himself was on edge the second he stepped foot in the waiting area of the dropship, Elliott could tell. Gloved hands clenched into fists, eyes fixed on the door, looking almost petulant if not for the fact that he was about to go kill people. It was a little hot, honestly, not that Elliott would tell that to anyone alive. Communal living gets horny, what can he say. 

They ended up ripping through team after team, him and Caustic and Bloodhound. Caustic hadn’t even done the usual ‘creepily watch enemies convulse in pain as they die’ thing for the cameras, something Elliott is sure he heard about from the PR team later. Bloodhound hadn’t managed to top the number of kills Caustic got that game, a whopping  _ thirteen _ , five legends and eight outlanders. Caustic on a regular day would’ve relished those kills, a testament to his formula, but- none of them involved his traps, or his grenades. Elliott watched almost every single one, with the exception of a hip fired longbow kill Caustic had at the very beginning while they were all scrambling for weapons. All thirteen of them were done with guns rather than gas. 

Is it weird, to pay this much attention to a teammate he’s barely ever interacted with outside the games? Yeah, maybe. But Elliott feels, as he watches them get squadded together for a fourth time, that it might come in handy sometime soon.

xx

They drop in Outlook, miles away from the hot spot of the match, and loot in peaceful silence before Gibraltar announces he’s moving towards the factory. “If you want to join,” he adds over comms. 

Mirage looks towards where Caustic is inspecting a Peacekeeper on the ground in front of him. He’s less on edge this game than the previous one, Mirage thinks, but only by a slim margin. He still hasn’t said a word and it’s been upwards of ten minutes since they landed.”Yeah,” Mirage says, “I’m with you, just, give me a second.” He mutes his comm. 

Mirage wanders over to his other teammate. “Caustic,” he says. “Are you, uh…” He loses steam the second Caustic looks at him. He’s in full ‘evil scientist’ mode, now, which is understandable because they’re in a match, duh, but. Well, whatever. What was Mirage thinking, anyway? The guy clearly didn’t like him much.

“Yes?” Caustic sounds uninterested, bored. Mirage clears his throat, shifting awkwardly.    
  
“Never- nevermind.”

They go hours without seeing another soul, each of them growing more and more on edge as time passes. Mirage hates slow matches, looting and running for hours with no kills to show for any of it. When the announcer mentions a supply drop for the fourth or fifth time, it feels like the perfect challenge to break the continuity.

He drops hints about needing better gear until Caustic (and Gibraltar, but he never really needs convincing) agree to head towards the care package. It’s in the middle of a clearing, and they’re lucky they don’t get sniped standing around waiting for the compartments to open. The only thing actually useful there at this point in the game is the gold helmet clipped inside. Mirage picks it up gingerly and looks to Gibraltar, who gestures for him to take it. 

“I’ll be fine with what I got,” he says, and claps Mirage on the back with such force that the helmet slips out of his hands and falls to the ground. A slip of paper is nestled inside the helmet’s padding. Folded, it bears the sponsors’ sigil: a sheep’s head, in the same style as the ram that represents the Apex Predators.

He unfolds it. The note reads completely in Gaean rather than standard, and though Mirage has never been particularly good at picking up languages, what with his, uh, stutter, he recognizes a few phrases:

_ to watch you play  _ (perform? Knowing the context, it’s probably perform) 

_ killing them  _

_ pleasure _

_to_ _feel_

 _thinking_ _about_???

“Caustic,” Mirage says. “Aren’t you from Gaea?” Caustic looks up from where he’d been setting a trap. He looks concerned by the question, if those eyebrows of his are any indication. He stalks over, grabs Mirage’s wrist and yanks the note out of his hand. 

“Geez, no need to snatch,” Mirage grumbles. 

Caustic damn near growls at him. “This is not for you.” It’s the most outwardly angry Mirage has ever seen him.

Out of all the people who play these games, he would’ve expected Caustic to be the last one to get a secret letter from a sponsor. And no, that isn’t his narcissist talking. Really. 

Mirage picks up and equips the gold helmet from where it lies discarded in the dirt. “Listen, I know when to not stick my nose into other people’s business,” he lies. Caustic ignores him, pushes his goggles up on his forehead to read. Dear God, he has  _ freckles.  _ Mirage shivers — no lusting after the murderous teammate, Elliott, Christ. He opens his mouth to speak, honestly just to ask if they can move to better cover, but Gibraltar motions for him to hush. 

As he reads, Caustic’s fist tightens to crush the note. When he finishes, he shoves it in his pocket. “It was about nothing of importance.” He says to no one in particular, and gee, he may be a sociopath murderer or whatever but he’s certainly the worst liar Mirage has ever come across. “It will not affect the match, in any case. We should proceed.” 

Caustic nods, once, as if agreeing with himself, then puts his goggles back over his eyes and begins to stalk in the direction of the next ring. 

Mirage frowns at Gibraltar. “I recognized some of the words in there,” he says. Gibraltar shakes his head.

“I don’t wanna know, brother. If it’s Caustic’s business, I do  _ not  _ wanna know.’

xx

They win, because Mirage is good little bait and lets his big mean tanks take care of the enemies while he darts around and distracts them with his decoys. It’s not the most original strat but hey, it works. 

If Mirage stares just a bit too long at the way Caustic sets down his traps, is a little too mesmerized by the arterial spray of whomever Caustic cuts through with his R-301, well that’s for Mirage to know and everyone else to politely ignore. It’s a wonder they won at all, with Caustic’s mind clearly elsewhere and Mirage’s on.. well, on Caustic. 

Caustic doesn’t come to the bar with all of them that night, but he does show up there a couple of weeks later, days before the next game. 

Outside of battle he looks almost just as high strung, but he’s skinnier without gear than Elliott imagined he’d be. He has weight on him no doubt; yet it’s clear said gear accounts for most of the bulk Elliott (and everyone else) is used to seeing when they’re in the ring. 

Elliott creeps on him from a few tables away, watches as Caustic nurses his drink, smokes a cigarette. Ajay slaps him on the arm after awhile. 

“You know not to fuck with him, right? He’s like, actually evil.” She raises her eyebrows at Elliott, who waves her off. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Elliott says. Right now, nothing about Caustic seems particularly villainous. He looks more like a tired father than anything else (not that Elliott knows what  _ that _ looks like, ha.) His clothes are.. Well, they're clothes, is all Elliott can say. There are probably some seams and individual garments somewhere in the midst of all that black, he’s just not sure where, exactly. His hair and beard look exactly the same, and now Elliott can even see the hint of a mouth buried under there, and those weird, sharp, Gaean eyebrows. 

The cigarette is a bit of a surprise, what with the poor shape Caustic’s lungs already seem to be in, but Elliott supposes even ‘mad scientists’ have their vices. 

Ajay watches Elliott watching Caustic, tuts, shakes her head. Renée pretends to glare next to her, but a little smirk escapes and rests briefly on her lips. “I'm an adult,” Elliott insists, “I can make my own decisions! Besides,” he says, returning his gaze to where Caustic sits across the room. “It isn’t like he’d hurt me,” he says. “Outside of the ring, that is.”

“You don’t know that,” Renée says. “Don’t you know not to trust people?”

“Psshhh,” Elliott says, but he isn’t paying attention to the pair of them anymore, and they go back to bickering off to his side. Elliott is much more preoccupied by the man that has come to join Caustic in his booth. 

The first thing Elliott notices about him is how close to Caustic he is. Caustic’s body language remains mostly the same, facing away from his new partner, but he switches his cigarette to his other hand so that the smoke flows directly into the man’s face. Elliott can see him frown, but he doesn’t move away. 

The guy is old, much older than Caustic for sure. White, of course, on his way to the grave but clearly set to go down even faster with the way he’s cozying up to a murderer. Caustic’s lips move — god, does Elliott wish he had super hearing, he would get his face rubbed in the dirt by Anita a hundred times over to know whatever words are being spoken — and whatever he says must please the guy, because he scoots even closer.

Elliott can see his arm move towards Caustic, and his hand disappears under the table. Caustic’s nostrils flare and he takes another drag from his cigarette. If Elliott angles his head  _ just so _ , he can barely see the man’s hand resting on Casutic’s black-clad thigh. 

When he looks over, to ask the girls if they’re  _ seeing this,  _ they are indeed leaning in, staring at Caustic and his elderly suitor. “Is he?” Renée asks. Her cheeks flush. “He’s not. He is not.” Her brain would jump to the most lecherous conclusion. 

“He really isn’t,” Elliott says, “look.” He grabs the back of her neck and angles it so she can see the goings on under the table. “Just a grope, for now.” 

Ajay looks positively  _ shocked _ , and Elliott can’t say he blames her. They all know Caustic’s identity; hard as he’s tried to hide it, living in close quarters doesn’t exactly lend itself to the kind of secrecy that a fugitive needs to stay truly anonymous. That being said, there’s more than one Legend that wants to stay mysterious, and it’s generally respected among the group of them that name dropping those individuals isn’t done. 

Getting handsy with Alexander Nox,  _ terrorist _ , isn’t something the average person would do, Elliott knows that much. No matter if the guy knows Nox’s identity or not- it’s his aura _ , _ as Elliott’s mother would say. Nox broods, sure, but it’s more than that. Despite his bluster it makes Elliott nervous, and after his time with the Predators that’s not the easiest thing to do. 

Yeah, he’s hot, in a rugged, stinky way, but man. Man, oh man. Elliott knows better when it comes to getting his nut, that’s for sure. 

After ten minutes, the three of them leant forward so far and straining their ears so hard it’s a wonder they go unnoticed, Nox and The Man, as Elliott has taken to calling him, depart the scene. They don’t touch as they walk away, but Nox’s fist is clenched by his side. They disappear into the mess of bodies and tables. 

  
Ajay leans back in her seat and takes a healthy gulp from her drink. “Shit,” she says. “He really went with that geezer.” Something about Nox’s body language did not scream ‘ _ fuck yeah I am about to get laid by this old dude _ ’, though. Elliott frowns. 

“He didn’t seem very into it,” he says. “Maybe it’s not a sex thing.” 

“It may not be to Caustic,” Renée says, “but it definitely was to that guy.” Elliott has to agree. He’s had enough hookups to know the look of someone who knows- or  _ thinks _ , anyway- that they’re about to get laid, and that guy definitely had it. Shit, Elliott himself knows he’s had that look plenty of times. It’s just, something doesn’t compute when the other piece of that equation is  _ Caustic _ . 

Elliott’s a master at sticking his nose into places it doesn’t belong, okay, that’s like half of the charm. Scrappy, sexy, and silly all rolled into one, as his ex-fling from Psamanthe used to say. Elliott had always thought that the alliteration was a bit extra, but, whatever. The point is, he knows he could snoop, if he wanted to. But does he? Should he? His instincts say no, fuck no, that’s a huge violation of his teammate’s privacy, its fucked up for Elliott to even think about it.. 

But also, like, what if Caustic’s in trouble, you know? Surely he’d understand a little professional concern, right?   
  
“Hm,” Elliott says. Ajay and Renée turn twin glares on him. 

“Nuh uh,” Ajay says, “Don’t pull that look, Elliott, I fuckin’ hate when you pull that look.”   
  
“What look?” Elliott asks, innocently as he can. “I have no idea what you could even be referring to.” 

Ajay flicks him. “The look that means you’re about to go poke the bear, man.”

“The bear, in this case, being Caustic,” Renée adds helpfully. Elliott musters up a glare for both of them. 

“So, what, participating in a blood sport ain’t good enough for you? You gotta go get yourself into actual danger now?” Ajay shakes her head at him, again. “Don’t act like you don’t know that messin’ in that guy’s business will mean trouble.” 

She’s right, Elliott knows she is. But, to be honest, blood sports  _ aren’t  _ doing it for him anymore. It’s his job, now, just like bartending was. He doesn’t know where the constant desire to get himself into trouble comes from. If Elliott’s looking at it from like, a deeper level, he knows it’s probably due to unresolved trauma or some shit. He should listen to Ajay; for all that she’s like 6 years younger than him, she’s probably (definitely) wiser. 

All this stuff, he thinks over for a good minute, at least.

“Listen,” Elliott says. “If you guys don’t wanna go on what I’m sure is a fun-filled adventure to find out the identity of Mr. Caustic’s mysterious companion, then I suppose I can’t force you.” Elliott finishes his drink. “But,” he continues, standing from the table, “just know that you’re probably gonna be missing out on like, a  _ lot  _ of great legend gossip.” He points at the two of them, both looking incredibly unimpressed, and says, “Don’t pretend you’re above it, okay? Do me the courtesy of acknowledging that we’re all scumbags.. some more than others, sure, like obviously Natalie’s moral compass is probably like, objectively sounder than, say, mine, but..” 

“Elliott,” Renée says. “Enough.” Ajay blows him a kiss. 

He throws up his hands. “Fine! Fine, okay, I’ll shut up.” He tosses the money for their drinks down on the table. “See you girls in the ring, then,  _ I suppose. _ ” 

Renée just laughs. 

xx

One thing Elliott can credit his time with the Predators for is his ability to tail people. Even though Nox and his.. Consort? Buddy? John? Have a fairly decent head start, he’s able to figure out where they went rather quickly. A couple smiles flashed, a phone number given out, and Elliott’s queries about the bigger, stony-looking man and his elderly companion pay off. Outside, on the bar’s porch, a sweet girl gives Elliott directions. “They went that way,” she says, pointing left, further into downtown. “This a real number?” She asks. Elliott winks at her.

“Real as me,” he says, and kisses her on the cheek.

Tonight, the drop ship is docked in Solace, (isn’t it always?) which gives Elliott an advantage. He knows this bar, and the surrounding area, as well as the back of his damn hand. Based on the, uh, sexual tension, reciprocated or not, in the interaction between the two people Elliott’s trying to find, it isn’t difficult to assume they’re probably going to a hotel. 

_ Don’t think about what they’re doing there don’t think about what they’re doing there this is recon this is recon this is _

A fairly expensive hotel, if Elliott were to go off the look of the stranger alone. Any rich person with a modicum of thought would spring for a cheaper one, but.. well. Elliott’s already established that there’s no way this man can be ‘street smart’, if he’s smart at all. 

Elliott’s amateur sleuthing brings him to one of the nicer hotels downtown,  _ Nostalgia _ . He’s sure it’s a pretty nostalgic place for some people, but not in a good way. 

“Hello,” he says to the pretty clerk manning the front desk. Their name tag reads  _ VAL _ in elegant cursive. “I’m meeting a couple of my friends here tonight, and I was only wondering if you could tell me whether you’ve seen them yet?”   


This one is not as easy to impress as the girl at the bar was. They raise an eyebrow at Elliott skeptically. Elliott smiles in response, convincingly, he hopes. “Why don’t you just call them?”

“Well, if you’d seen them, you’d have known that one of them is.. aging, to say the least. He’s not the best with these, uh newfangled devices,” Elliott tries. The clerk sighs at him. 

“Cell phones have been around for like 400 years, buddy. You’re gonna have to try harder than that if you want me to risk my job.” 

Elliott sighs. “Fine,” he says, and pulls out his wallet. Thanks to his last couple wins he’s got a hundred or so credits on him. “Will this do?” He holds them up. Val looks unimpressed.

“I’m not gonna give you their room number,” they tell Elliott dryly. “That’s a serious violation of policy and their privacy, and just because you’re a celebrity, and he’s your friend, doesn’t mean you can just walk around getting your way. Someone’s gotta put you in your place.” 

Elliott stares at them. “So they did come through — ” 

“However,” Val continues, “I’m broke, so I’ll tell you this much: whatever they’re planning on doing up there, and I think you know what that is, the big guy didn’t seem too thrilled about it.” They snatch the bill out of Elliott’s grasp. “Happy? Can I go back to actually helping customers now?”

Elliott turns around. There’s no one else in the lobby save for an unremarkable-looking businessman, slumped and sleeping on one of the love seats in the corner. 

“My point stands,” Val says from behind him. Elliott gives them a look. “I’m sure your friend will be fine, you got what you wanted, goodbye.” Val very pointedly gestures to the door, then continues scribbling down whatever they’d been working on when Elliott had arrived. 

“What do you mean by he ‘didn’t look thrilled?’ Did he look worried? Scared? Angry? Come on, for a hundred bucks you gotta give me more than that.”

Val scoffs. “I didn’t have to give you anything at all. Seems like  _ you _ owe  _ me. _ ” Elliott sighs. In any case, Val’s right about one thing: Nox is probably fine, physically at least. Not that Elliott would be welcome to help were he  _ not _ , but.. 

He turns to leave, totally unsatisfied but feeling like he’s probably not the only one, and Val’s right, it’s not his business anyway- 

Elliott whirls back around. “Do I know you from somewhere?” 

Val doesn’t look up from their place behind the desk. “What.” 

“It’s just.. you don’t hear that accent very often on Solace.” 

“An expert in dialects, are you? I thought you were an engineer.”

Elliott points at them. “And that! Dropping casual hints about how you know more about me than I do about you into conversation like you’re some.. some Bond villain or something.” 

Val sighs, very slowly, like Elliott is the most exasperating person they’ve ever had to deal with in their entire life. Elliott knows that sigh, has heard it from just about everyone he’s ever met.

“Fine,” he says, “keep your secrets. I may not be as smart as some of my teammates but I’ll figure you out, Val.” 

“You’re only on Solace for another 13 hours, Elliott. You and your friend better get going soon.” Val finally looks at him. Elliott has seen them before, he knows he has. 

Maybe that isn’t it, though. “Maybe you just remind me of someone.” 

“Hm,” Val replies, having gone back to writing. “I wonder who that could be.”

“I think you know.”

“Perhaps. Nonetheless,” they say. “Good _ bye _ , Elliott.”

As he steps outside he considers actually leaving, going back to his apartment, or to the bar, doing absolutely anything else but invading his teammate's privacy even more than he already has. But.

He finds himself walking around the hotel, to the back, where he assumes (correctly) that there'll be a service stairwell leading outside. Elliott leans against the wall there, and waits. 


End file.
